Thursday, October 12, 2006

The Constitution and Secret Government

Toward an American Revolution, a book by Jerry Fresia, (click here) for websiteExposing the Constitution and other Illusions

The Constitution and Secret GovernmentEarly in 1934, Irene Du Pont and William S. Knudsen [General Mortors president] reached their explosion point over President Roosevelt. Along with friends of the Morgan Bank and General Motors, certain Du Pont backers financed a coup d'á‚átat that would overthrow the President with the aid of a $3 million-funded army of terrorists, modeled on the fascist movement in Paris known as the Croix de Feu...

[Roosevelt] knew that in view of the backing from high banking sources, this matter could not be dismissed as some crackpot enterprise...

On the other hand, Roosevelt also knew that if he were to arrest the leaders of the houses of Morgan and Du Pont, it would create an unthinkable national crisis...Not for the first or last time in his career, he was aware that there were powers greater than he in the United States. -Charles Higham1

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Part 2A System of InjusticeWhat shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men [and women] in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!- Henry David Thoreau

Chapter 4The LieI do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world - which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life...

owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us - very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will - that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.- James Baldwin, 1953

* * * *The Ultimate Check: Secret Police

Consider briefly the experience of blacks in this country. The enslavement of human beings continued for seventy-six years after the signing of the Constitution. In 1865 the Black Codes, which were the slave codes revived, legally restored white supremacy as southern states rejoined the union. In the presidential election of 1876, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden received more popular votes than the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, but the Democrats agreed to allow the electoral commission to declare Hayes the winner so that they could retain political control and white supremacy in southern states.

Following that historic “compromise,” blacks were disenfranchised and the most severe and extended period of racist violence, excepting slavery itself, began. Between 1882 and 1930, a system of state sponsored terror was in operation that resulted in the lynching of 3,386 blacks.

Racism, of course, still continues. The median household net worth for whites in 1984 was $39,135. For blacks, it was $3,397. The poverty rate for whites was 11.5 percent while for blacks it was 33.8 percent. Infant mortality rate in 1982 for whites was 10.1 percent while for blacks it was 19.6.

The male murder rate for blacks that year was four times that of whites. Blacks have been victims of medical experimentation, particularly in prison but not always. The state of Georgia during the early 1970s, for example, sterilized several “mentally deficient” black girls.26

Numerous other data, measure, and personal testimony could be wheeled into place to further make the case that the systematic denial of the humanity of people of color is taking place in our society. And similar claims could be advanced, and are done so regularly, that other categories of people in our society experience systematic oppression.

The key word here is systematic. That is, the oppression in question is linked to the web of ideas, values, beliefs, assumptions, and practices that help to make up the social relationships in which we are all implicated. Or has Hegel has stated, the world which is outside us has its threads in us to such a degree that it is these threads which make us what we really are.

The problem is not just that there is systematic racism and/or massive inequality in an otherwise free society. If there is systematic racism and/or massive inequality in a society that is believed by most of its members to be basically free, it means that the humanity of the non-oppressed, as well as the oppressed, is diminished. One can hardly be thought of as a healthy person if one has lost the ability to understand (and act on that understanding) the oppression of another.